Dr. Evans Fiakpui fits no one’s stereotype of a “New Age” enthusiast. He is an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Chicago Hospital, a soft-spoken, conservatively-dressed man of great seriousness who speaks in the clipped, cultured accent of his native Ghana. Recently he described his introduction, through Transcendental Meditation, to the ancient healing art of Ayurveda.
More and more hardworking professionals find that they have more energy, need less sleep, and feel more alert after they have begun practicing TM and other meditation techniques. Meditation has been around in one form or another for thousands of years. Mystics and seers, sometimes aided by hallucinogens, self-mortification, or the rhythmic repetition of chants or mantras, have entered trance states in which they have experienced ideas, insights, or even visions that they have interpreted as indicators of having achieved a higher state of awareness. In 1957, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi turned meditation into big business when he introduced Transcendental Meditation, with its specific terminology and personal mantra technique.
The complete practice of Ayurveda has a tradition that extends far back into India’s history. Like most of what have come to be called “indigenous” health systems, it emphasizes maintaining a state of balance within oneself and with one’s environment, rather than attacking disease in specific parts of the body after it has manifested itself. There is music therapy and sound therapy, even Ayurvedic surgery, all practiced with the idea that sickness is a sign of a person’s underlying state of imbalance, and that the balance must be restored if the person is to get well. In this sense, Ayurveda shares with many socalled “alternative” medical practices elements that many observers are coming to feel have been increasingly lost in Western medicine.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Ayurveda in its entirety, of course, is far more than vitamins and chicken soup. Based on ideas developed in India over thousands of years, it’s an entire science of medicine that practitioners say has been rescued from obscurity by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Dr. Jay Glaser, a physician from Fairfield, Iowa, was in Chicago recently to deliver a lecture on Ayurveda and TM to physicians at Saint Anthony Hospital on the west side. He explained the history and basic beliefs behind the practice. Like Dr. Fiakpui, Dr. Glaser is articulate and rather conservative looking. He speaks with a quiet confidence but has none of the spaced-out earnestness we’ve come to associate with followers of New Age beliefs. He does, however, possess enormous energy despite being a very composed, serene man. He explained that to understand Ayurvedic medicine, one must first understand a philosophical paradigm very different from that familiar to most Westerners.
Most non-Judeo-Christian belief systems are based on a worldview that perceives the relationship between the individual and his world and the cosmos as one of a delicately intertwined harmony. Rather than being ruled and guided by a distant, paternalistic God, the forces of nature are seen to possess their own inherent intelligence; deities, often female, shape and guide events through their manifestations in the consciousness possessed by all living things and, in some cases, even in objects such as rocks and the planets themselves, which most Westerners would consider inanimate.
Not all observers agree with this assessment. A local scholar who has written extensively on alternative healing dismisses such claims as “ideological turf wars,” although he concurs, as do most critics, that meditation itself has much validity, as do many of the precepts of Ayurvedic healing. Glaser, however, was adamant and ready with examples to prove his point.
Many of these theories linking quantum mechanics and holistic medicine are still embryonic; they are difficult to express in everyday language, largely because physicists prefer to conceive of reality in terms of mathematical formulations. But clearly, something is afoot that suggests a coherence between holism and science.
